When Camus looked back over his early autobiographical writings, where he had tried to depict his feelings about his family background of poverty and cultural deprivation in Algiers, he felt very dissatisfied. He said he was only too conscious of the immaturity of these essays: he even believed that if he did not make another attempt at this subject he would have achieved nothing. So Camus began thinking about The First Man, a novel that was to be different from anything he had written before. It would be a “traditional novel,” although he had doubts about whether he was really a “traditional” writer. The new work was to be the truly authentic novel of his maturity.

At the time of his death, the stance Camus had taken—in vain—for reconciliation in Algeria, followed by his agonized decision to stay silent, had left him isolated.

Propelled by the tragedy of the French-Algerian conflict (1954–62), with its twin horrors of torture and terror, Camus was aiming at an epic on a Tolstoyan scale, his own personal War and Peace. This book would at last fully explain hisAlgeria to the French, and especially to his erstwhile friends, those self-righteous Left intellectuals who had moved from utter indifference toward the colony to support for the Algerian terrorists. Where the youthful essays had been marked by his well-known reserve and discretion, the new work would be distinguished by simplicity and directness. He